Retired teacher Erich Martel wrote the following letter to the Washington Post in response to its article about the sky-high expulsion rates of charter schools:
The District’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education enrollment audits and the D.C. Comprehensive Assessment System reports and graduation reports show that charter high schools take advantage of their freedom from responsibility for educating challenging students by quietly transferring many more students than they expel. This may also help explain why charter lobbyists are opposed to charters becoming neighborhood schools [Mark Schneider and Robert Cane, “Why charters shouldn’t be ‘neighborhood schools,’ ” Local Opinions, Dec. 30].
In its Jan. 6 article on expulsions, The Post described a mother withdrawing her daughter Elsie to avoid having an expulsion appear on Elsie’s record and, unsaid, on Thurgood Marshall Academy’s. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Elsie’s ninth-grade class numbered 138; by April 2010 (18 months later), the 10th grade testing cohort was 87 (28 boys; 59 girls!). Sixty-three students graduated in June 2012, 46 percent of the original ninth-grade class. Fifty-seven of the 75 missing students were removed from Thurgood Marshall’s reponsibility by transfer — presumably to traditional public schools — it claimed a graduation rate of 78 percent, higher test scores and the acclaim of being “high-achieving.”
Between the October 2010 and 2011 enrollment audits, D.C. charter high schools’ ninth, 10th and 11th grade cohorts transferred more than 1,350 students, according to the Office of the State Superintendent of Education. It’s time for a serious investigation of this practice.
Erich Martel, Washington
The writer taught in D.C. public schools from 1969 to 2011.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This post is vital for all your readers to read and digest as to how Charters that DO show better graduation percentages and rising test scores may be doing so by “transfer magic.” Thank you!
How come the media doesn’t pick this up? Information like this needs to get to the press so all taxpayers can see it.
This is why…read excerpt and see article:
In America today, however, a trend toward corporate media consolidation is drowning diverse opinions and eliminating local control. In 1983, 90 percent of the American media was owned by 50 companies. Today, 90 percent is controlled by just six corporations: General Electric, News Corp., Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/fcc-rule-change-would-help-big-media-85262.html#ixzz2HxcAfBEa
I find myself wondering about the percentages of students with disabilities in these figures. How many students with special education needs did the charters accept in the first place? How many were left after all the “transfer magic”?
I wonder how many students transfer from one charter to another, vs. from a charter to a public school.
I’m curious to know what are the criteria or disciplinary
system under which so many children are expelled ( or threatened
with expulsion.) It seems bizarre that so many children would be
lost from any given school population.
I urge all the readers of this blog to click on the first link in Diane’s posting. The comment that elicited a response from Erich Martel was from Mike Doherty of Takoma Park. Mike fearlessly proclaims charter schools don’t expel too many students; rather, public schools don’t expel enough. His comments support those of another Fearless Mike, aka Michael J. Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (“Advancing Educational Excellence”), who has abandoned all pretense of “a better education for all” by recently stating that schools need to support the winners [good students] and abandon the losers [bad students]. Lest you not give due credence to MikeTalk, note that his is described by his employer as “one of the nation’s foremost education experts.”
Perhaps this blog—maybe Edushyster will lend a hand and an extra wine cask—could have an Honor Roll of those that let the cats out of the bag. At the end of the year the most outstanding inductees could receive the Mark Twain Plaque with their name in calligraphic letters and just below the often-cited remark by the noted American humorist [his own material or borrowed from someone else] that “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than speak and remove all doubt.”
Or perhaps the plaque could just be called the Remove All Doubt Award?
Just a modest proposal.
🙂
Playing fast and loose with student’s who might negatively impact schools test scores, be it for NCLB or RTT is nothing new! I’ve seen it done in Fort Worth TX where public
schools would call parents to tell them that their children (low score testing kids)
could just “stay home” on the day of testing! Wa La! These doctored schools always rated “highly achieving” in state mandated tests. Sounds like cheating to me! Schools in Colorado have similar inventive ways to play games with scores. Most of the faculties are aware of these wide spread, intellectually dishonest scams but would never
breathe a word for fear of their jobs. It appears that the shenanigans described in this article are becoming the MO for Charter School movements across the board. Doctored scores are pandemic and the propaganda for the anti-public school, pro-charters
corporatist s who will do “whatever it takes” to pull the wool over the parents and
gain a rich, $ bottom line, with the children parents and teachers all paying the price!
Public schools have cheated children for decades. NOW they want us to pay them a little more, add a few more benefits and THIS TIME they PROMISE to educate them. Jeesh
Terry…your time blogging while at work is up. Students First needs you back at your desk to mail out the gift cards and write “parent” letters. Quick…Michelle is coming and she has duct tape. Pronto!
Terry,
You are posting too much and your rants are too predictable.
If you have nothing to contribute but insults, post elsewhere.
Otherwise, I’m going to delete your comments.
You are a distraction and your comments add nothing but venom.
Diane
And that’s AFTER they cream the best students.
I hate the fraud that charters are perpetrating –claiming to raise test scores through superior teaching, when in fact it’s due to winnowing of students. However their actions expose an inconvenient truth: the disruptive kids really drag down the regular public schools in many ways, and these schools do not have adequate tools for dealing with them. Unless these schools admit the problem and push for stronger disciplinary tools, the majority of parents might find it more rational to send their kids to charter schools where their kids can be free of the rampages of the wild kids. I teach in a suburban non-charter middle school, and my teaching is seriously impaired by the strain of dealing with obstreperous students. 90% of students get penalized because of the behavior of the other 10%. To give the charters their due, this is one injustice that the charter schools DO remedy.
I actually understand what you are saying Ponderosa. It does help when you no longer have disruptive students in your classroom. The only thing that really bothers me is that this becomes a shell game. The students are shifted into a public school who then has to deal with them. Or, the kid has to find a new school and may not be truly educated for a significant time period. This makes me mad because the charter is not forced to deal with the problem but the public school does. Meanwhile, the CEO keeps money that would have gone to an alternative school. They really have no responsibility to educate the student.
This is typical of inner city charters. You could profile every inner city charter across America and probably find the same story. It is easy to get away with this when you don’t have elected school board members or serve people from a well linked community. I can’t believe this has been promoted from the Dept. of Ed. I keep thinking the tide is slowly turning on the “reform” movement. I just hope it is.